The Hoge Veluwe

I took today off work; leaving her mother in charge of the small beings, Anne and I headed up to the Hoge Veluwe area of the Netherlands, a little island of high ground amidst the flatness, which is also a national park.

We stayed in the rather classy Hotel Sterrenberg, very nice dinner, bed and breakfast, and then struck into the heart of the park to visit the Kröller-Müller Museum. I’m not a particular art fan myself but I loved looking around the museum’s sculpture garden – here, for instance, is the Needle Tower of Kenneth Snelson taken from below:

There were a couple of others that I really liked, this set of shapes:

and this levitating lady:

But the largest exhibit was one you could actually climb inside, Jean Dubuffet’s Enamel Garden, whose original French name now has quite different overtones (Le Jardin d’Email). Here’s Anne, reclining determinedly:

and here’s the context:

and looking the other way to where I was standing:

Then it was back inside to the art museum, where photography was not allowed, and in any case half of it is being rebuilt (a good reason to go back again next year). Inside, we wandered around until we found this:

and in case we were in any doubt about who it was by, just along the wall was this:

Numerous other great artists there (mainly late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) but those two made the biggest impression on me.

After that we were pretty much museumed out.

The Hoge Veluwe has this nice system where there are a large number of white bicycles owned by the park, available for any park users to pick up as long as you put them back where you found them. So from the museum, we had a decent bike ride up to Mrs Kröller-Müller’s hunting lodge, and a somewhat longer way back due to, er, map-reading error. Then a decent (and suitably late) lunch, a look around the visitors’ centre, and home after a satisfying break.

We took a detour on the way back to see a place that had long fascinated me: the town of Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau where the Belgian border jumps north by a few miles and plays leap-frog among the houses of a typical Dutch village. It would have been better to have gone there with a map to show exactly what the quirks of the border are; there’s very little to indicate it on the ground, and nothing worth photographing. Still at least I know now.

One thought on “The Hoge Veluwe

  1. I am so going to get in trouble when that earworm surfaces in the office tomorrow.

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